Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

For any business, staying in touch with potential and existing customers regularly is very important, and the most cost-effective way to do this is via email.

However, it’s important to have an efficient system through which to sent the emails. Email marketing campaigns, if just done manually, can be extremely time-consuming. Managing a list of email addresses, deleting those who choose to unsubscribe and those addresses which are no longer functional, on top of creating the newsletter itself, can all add up to hours, or even days.

Many small business start their mailing lists in this way, but as their lists grow they find them increasingly difficult to manage. Many people imagine that upgrading to an automated system that produces professional emails – perhaps even personalised to match their website – might be complicated, expensive, or both. However, this is not the case!

We work with a email marketing system called Campaign Monitor, which is cost effective and extremely flexible, even for relatively small mailing lists. We can design email newsletters to match your site, which you can either take as a template for creating your own newsletters, or just leave it all to us.

As well as boosting your image with a professionally designed email newsletter, Campaign Monitor takes all the fuss out of managing an email list. Every email sent through the system includes a small ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the page, so if anyone no longer wants to hear from you, all it takes is one click. If an email address bounces, Campaign Monitor can remove it from the list automatically. You can add an automatic subscription form to your website for people to join the list. In short, Campaign Monitor will manage your subscribers for you – there’s no more time-consuming address book management.

What’s more, once your email is sent, you have access to statistics such as who opens the email, who clicks on the links to your website – information which is difficult trace when emails are sent manually.

On top of this, there are dozens of other features: newsletter designs can be tested to ensure that they will display properly in all the major email clients, and you can make separate lists for customers who may have slightly different interests within your service. If you wish, you can even track whether recipients of the email have forwarded it on to a friend.

Here are some examples of Campaign Monitor newsletters we have designed and sent for clients in the past:

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Very soon we’ll be launching a new site for fundraiser Graham Kennedy. Graham organises an annual sponsored bike ride to raise money for research into finding a cure for Friedreich’s Ataxia, and this year, in recognition of his fundraising work, he received an MBE in the New Year’s Honours.

Since 1991 the Big Bad Bike Ride has raised almost £600,000 for Ataxia UK, a charity which supports medical research into the causes and possible treatments of Friedreich’s Ataxia. The name ‘ataxia’ means ‘absence of order’, and people with the condition have problems with co-ordination which usually become progressively worse over time.

Graham started his fundraising campaign after his two children were diagnosed with the condition in 1990. His aim is to raise one million pounds for the charity, and, one ambition, he says, “to close York with a massive bike ride, similar to what happens in Cape Town every March when 36,000 take part.”

This year the Big Bad Bike Ride will take place near Pitlochry in the Scottish Highlands, on an undulating circuit of 75 miles. If previous years’ turn-outs are anything to go by, it should see over one hundred riders taking up the challenge.

Graham says the award is “a tribute to all the people who have helped me. Over the years, a lot of people, mainly from the York area, have been involved in the bike rides.”

The Big Bad Bike Ride website will be launched on 15th January 2010.

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WordPress is a powerful, yet simple, blog management system which runs online. Installation and customization is simple, it can be skinned to look like almost anything and if you don’t have a design in mind there are hundreds of themes available. The license allows us to modify the templates as much as we like and does not even require we credit WordPress… oh and its completely free!

This makes WordPress a great, highly fexible content management system, take a look at our post on using WordPress as a content management system here.

But WordPress is just as useful ‘out of the box’, it contains everything you need to set up and manage a successful blog and can be a great asset to your website, giving it an up-to-date feeling, while increasing repeat visits and improving SEO. There are thousands of plug-ins available for WordPress which do a range of things from running automatic backups and basic security, to automatically updating your Twitter account and turning your blog into a photo gallery.

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Jollydays Luxury Camping had a successful year marked by the receipt of the York Press New Business of the Year Award. The award was presented to Jollydays founders Christian and Carolyn Van Outersterp by Ron Godfrey, business editor of the Press, at a ceremony earlier this month.

After a fully booked summer, Jollydays are planning to expand deeper into the woodland, with potential for thirty additional tents equipped with even more luxurious features such as a four poster bed, vintage roll-top baths and flushing toilets.

Another York Press award, the Science and Technology Business of the Year award, saw another of our clients, Applied Web Analytics, as one of two runners up. Applied Web Analytics was launched in March this year by Dan Croxen-John, and the company’s website was given SEO treatment by Semlyen IT.

In yet another award category, Michael Hjort  – whose various websites are hosted by Semlyen IT – was a finalist in the Business Personality of the Year.  Michael owns Melton’s restaurant and Melton’s Too café bar, and is also director of York Food Festival.

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Several of our clients have made appearances in the national media over the past few weeks – in an article entitled ‘York’s top 10 budget eats‘ in the Guardian, Melton’s Too (whose restaurant sites, and various other endeavours such as York Food Festival, are hosted by Semlyen IT) appeared at the top of list. Also featured in the article was Le Langhe, whose Italian cafe and delicatessen has recently expanded to a full restaurant. Le Langhe’s site was redesigned in order to incorporate information about the restaurant, and a variety of new products have been added to their online Italian food shop.

Jollydays Luxury Camping enjoyed a sudden swell in their number of Facebook fans after a BBC television appearance on Alexander Armstrong’s Very British Holiday. The programme explored a variety of different holiday experiences within the UK as an alternative to overseas travel, highlighting the fact that a British holiday does not necessarily have to mean visiting a traditional seaside tourist trap in the rain. The footage of peaceful woodland and comfortable accommodation drew over one hundred new fans to the Facebook page, and undoubtedly raised public awareness of the concept of ‘glamping’!

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